The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
According to the development of mobile communication technologies and user terminal hardware/software technologies, various pieces of information can be pushed to a user terminal belonging to a user. Further, according to the improvements in data processing rates of servers, a service which is capable of combining various pieces of user information and content information according to a big data analysis and providing suitable contents to a user can be provided.
It is preferable that such a content providing service provides contents which are suitable for the user, that is, in which the user is interested, or contents which the user desires to acquire at that time. Accordingly, various services which provide proper region information, store information, product information and the like in a corresponding location by using location information of a user terminal are provided.
As a method of identifying location information of the user terminal, various methods are already known and examples thereof may include the following methods. A geo-fence technology estimates location information of a user terminal by using Wi-Fi (wireless LAN), the Global Positioning System (GPS), and a base station signal together and has the advantage of covering a wide region. Further, there is a method of using a BLE beacon device in which a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon device which outputs a BLE signal is installed in a predetermined location and a user terminal recognizes a beacon signal output from the BLE beacon device. In addition, there is a method in which a speaker which outputs sound waves is installed indoors and a user terminal recognizes the corresponding sound waves.
As described above, various location information identifying methods are already known, but they have advantages and disadvantages in coverage and accuracy. Further, when all of the three methods are used together, a user terminal should always enable a corresponding communication module, which leads to excessive battery consumption in the user terminal.